Local online groups have been shown to make a real difference to the local community aspects of people’s lives - discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever.

However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. So, unless someone tells you about a group directly, they are all but invisible.

GroupsNearYou.com solves this problem by letting people map the locations and details of groups they know about (anywhere in the world) and, importantly, help people find ones relevant to them.

By aggregating groups together on a single site with nice url’s and structured pages, it is starting to making some of them visible to Google for the first time. By make the data available via an API it allows people build other services onto of this data - a piece of pure internet infrastructure, with a positive social bent.

Nominated by Richard Pope, 21 May 2008

A lot of the stuff I do online is about what is happening locally. So being able to find others who are online near where I live is great, and that's what GroupsNearYou.com does.

I've found it to be very beneficial in seeing how local online communities are being built, to contribute to some of them, and to link to them from my blog.

Submitted by Andrew Brown, 27 May 2008

I do tons of activities with my family and friends in the local area and it's great to be able to try to find one site that will list all of these associations in one place - whether it's my local book group, my kids Sunday morning football group, my local Freecycle Group, wine tasting, my resident's association etc - they are all on different platforms. If I can tell local parents, residents, neighbours, colleagues, friends etc about them all in one big hit - that would save me so much time it's not true.

GroupsNearYou is a godsend for technically being able to do that.

Submitted by Joanna Banks, 29 May 2008

Very cool site. We are looking to use it for our community groups.

Submitted by lisa, 02 June 2008